A comprehensive descriptive analysis of gender wage differences over a long time period does not exist for West Germany. Using an empirical approach which explicitly takes into account changes of wage distributions for both males and females as well as life-cycle and birth cohort effects, we go beyond conventional decomposition techniques of the average gender wage gap. The paper provides stylized facts of the level and dynamics of the gender wage gap from 1975-95. The empirical analysis is based upon the IAB employment subsample. Our findings confirm the importance of distributional effects relating to skill level and employment status. While life-cycle wage growth is in general much lower for females compared to males, comparing their estimated time trends implies that the gender wage gap has narrowed substantially in the lower part of the wage distribution especially for low- and medium-skilled females but much less so in the upper part of the wage distribution. Surprisingly, we do not find any cohort effects for wages of female employees. Copyright Verein für Socialpolitik and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0475.00065File Function: link to full textDownload Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.